5th Grade: Building & Driving Robots

5th graders in Mr. Lusk and  Mr. Heaton's classes have pretty much finished building their robots and are now completing challenges moving blocks in order to improve their robot driving skills. This 5th grade robotics unit focuses on the real world problem of using robots to clean up nuclear waste. In this unit, we look at the real world example of what happened in 2011 with the destruction of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in Japan as a result of the 9.0 earthquake and tsunami. 

After students build their robots and practice driving them by completing simple challenges,  we have a big class competition where students work together with another team to clean up the "nuclear waste". The team with the most points wins.